CW: self-harm, child abandonment.
Hannah’s first impression of Colden Hills Music Camp is that, for a place with “hills” and “music” right in the name, it’s too flat and way, way too quiet, and the one thing she initially thinks must be a weird rustic flute propped up against the side of the welcome cabin turns out to be just an extra-straight stick some termites bored holes through.
Not that the band-camp angle was the main selling point for Hannah’s parents when they signed her up for a week of luxury bunk-bed living on the other side of the state line. The main draw for them was that Colden Hills was the most affordable sleepaway camp they could find that wasn’t already booked up for the summer. The main draw for Hannah was that, well, she’d just turned thirteen, and thirteen-year-olds don’t have much say in anything. Never mind that she’s a compact, bony thirteen, too easy to shuffle into the back seat of a car and nudge back out, suitcase in hand, onto a dirt path two hours and half a dozen unfamiliar highway signs later.
She’s not not into music, she guesses. Likes to listen to a song then listen to it again while looking at Lyrics Genius online, committing it to memory, the faster the words bullet at her, the better. Just, her mom gets these huge, world-ending headaches, so the screechy, halting practice of beginners, at least at their house, was never an option. Besides, Hannah’s always reminding herself, a life that revolves around something called a “spit valve”? That’s not a life she’s going to try overhard to pursue.
The choir route, also a no go. Her body, this body—she catches her reflection in the welcome cabin window: round face, straight lines everywhere but the pronounced slouch of her back under her stained ringer t-shirt, proof she was raised by computers. The quasi-mullet she gave herself that’s somehow party-nowhere. No, her body isn’t exactly what anyone would call an instrument.
Hannah reaches the front of the check-in line, casts her eyes back to see if the family’s trusty hatchback, Miles Stubaru, is maybe parked in the shade of one of the thick-limbed trees lining the path out of here, its headlights watchful and protective, waiting to make sure she gets through this part safe. But, no. Should’ve known better. Can’t fault good ol’ Miles, of course, but ever since her parents made the announcement about Colden Hills last week, it’s seemed like this moment couldn’t come soon enough.
“Happy Sunday!” The woman behind the desk grins her welcome-committee grin, somehow directing every one of her teeth at Hannah while keeping her eyes glued to the clipboard in front of her, ready to scroll. “Name, please?”
“Uh, it’s Hannah. Hannah Gessen.”
The woman is sunburnt everywhere Hannah can see, evidence that this is week two of the camp’s six weeks of summer programming: plenty of time to forget your tube of sunscreen back at the cabin, not enough time for the resulting burn to relax into a tan. But the splotchy pink’s really bringing out the blue in her eyes, and Hannah notices something pungent and vegetal—after-sun lotion, probably—folding into what she’s come to understand as Colden Hills’ signature aromatic profile: Basically, hey, what if we took a thousand of those little pine-shaped air fresheners, dropped them into a vat of rotten eggs, then stirred in the stringiest, mustiest algae east of Lake Erie?
“Gessen, Gessen . . . There you are.” The woman draws a tinier-than-tiny checkmark partway down the page, then slits her eyes up at Hannah. “So you’re the one who’s gonna keep us guessin’ this week, huh?”
Hannah’s a blank whiteboard, an incomplete pop quiz, one of those TI-84 calculators that’s like, Error! Error!
The woman laughs, reaches across the desk and gives Hannah’s shoulder a squeeze.
“Never mind, hon. Mnemonic device. Close to a hundred kids coming in every week, I gotta do something to keep you all straight.” She winks. “You’ll be in Dogwood, senior girls’ cabin. Take a right, cross the field, go past the flagpole, follow the signs. Real buggy out there by the water. Hope you brought spray. If not, you can pick some up at commissary tomorrow.”
Hannah takes one of those memory-palace journeys, trying to recall if the bug spray did in fact make it into her bag. Surely her mom remembered. They loved Hannah. “They” being mosquitoes. “They” being her parents too, obviously—Hannah does that quick mental revision, feeling embarrassed and kind of guilty that her own thoughts require so much red pen.
The bugs, though. Everywhere she goes, they’re drawn to her. Like she’s the sun in their solar system, except they’ll gladly break orbit to come hurtling toward her, totally mess up her surface terrain.
Hannah can feel the line of kids pressing in on her, and the cabin walls too, like they’ve collectively decided that she’s taken up enough of the welcome committee’s time—she doesn’t have to go home but she can’t stay here.
“Here, take a name tag.” The woman behind the desk hands Hannah one of those red-and-white hello-my-name-is numbers. “You’ll want it for the ice cream social. Happy belated, by the way. You just squeaked by. Almost had to put you in Sycamore with the little kids.” She says it with fate-worse-than-death commiseration, like she, like anyone, can understand how Hannah must be feeling right now.
The woman—Hannah notices she isn’t wearing a name tag herself—waves briskly in the direction of the door, finished with this particular item on the new-camper conveyor belt line. Hannah turns, the stupid wheels of her stupid suitcase catching on the cabin’s uneven floorboards as she goes.
When Hannah looks back, no surprise: sunburnt lady’s Happy-Sunday’ing someone new.
WELCOME NIGHT
The ice cream social is . . . better named than the camp itself, Hannah has to admit, in that there is ice cream. Upwards of three flavors, plus rainbow sprinkles and trail mix—Trail mix? Why trail mix?—and a bag of mini chocolate chips that got bumped at one point and half-emptied onto the floor. No whipped cream because that’s just asking for germy lips-on-nozzle and the counselors aren’t trying to start a mono outbreak night one.
And people are being social, or social-adjacent, standing in tight little circles, asking about hometowns, showing off summer vacation battle scars and shiny, white, new-this-season sneakers. Not that Hannah’s an authority on what does and doesn’t constitute friendly behavior. She’s always joked in her own head that she wasn’t socialized properly, being an only child with distracted parents and all.
Meaning the calculator-error-message thing all over again. She’s supposed to have about a hundred things in common with her fellow campers, right, just by virtue of being in exactly the same place and roughly the same age? But then they look at her and every word she’s ever known goes riding off into the sunset of her brain, like see ya, cowpoke, you’re on your own.
So here’s Hannah, standing between two groups but not really committing to either, holding her arms to her sides hoping nobody notices her ballooning sweat stains, thinking massively boneheaded thoughts like: What if strawberry is just vanilla with a bad case of sunburn?
Colonel Hannah in the mess hall with the strawberry cone. The offense? Social suicide.
Finally, one of the guy counselors rolls in a TV and puts Hannah out of her misery. He doesn’t look much older than some of the campers, but his name tag is way more official: printed, laminated, and hooked to a lanyard with the words MAPLE and TOMMY. Rows of fold-out chairs appear out of nowhere and the campers settle in to watch a history-of-Colden-Hills video, then a nature safety video, then a video about the camp’s values and codes of conduct. There’s a split-second mention of one of the founders, a local piano prodigy who went on to play the Caribbean cruise circuit, but no more is said about the camp’s name and what Hannah can expect in relation to it.
Different counselors step forward to tag-team orientation, intricate tag-in handshakes and everything, so Hannah gets the sense they come back to work here year after year. Meaning it can’t be that bad, can it? They talk about the camp’s layout, kind of a backwards question mark wrapped around a small, manmade lake. The top curve, the wraparound part, is home to all the cabins, the middle part is the straight path through the flagpole field, and the dot at the bottom is this map’s “You are here”—all the communal buildings, including the mess hall, commissary, and infirmary, along with the storage sheds and maintenance cabin.
Weekly schedule, themed days, mail delivery, swim tests, free time, wake-up calls, flag-raising duty, sportsmanlike behavior, unsportsmanlike behavior, lavatory etiquette, close-toed shoes, lights out, seconds at mealtimes, the send-off dance at week’s end—and pretty soon whatever ice cream’s left has turned to fly-catcher soup and the little kids are doing all-out gotta-go dances in their seats. Hannah’s sure the dam’s about to give when DOGWOOD, ERIN—the senior girls’ counselor and last in the line of perky undergrads—takes the stage.
“Okay, final order of business,” Erin says, half weightily, half reluctantly, like she’s not the real fun police, is just covering for them temporarily, got it? “Prank wars.” A wave of sniggers rolls through the room. “You love ’em, we love ’em. We know they’re part of the culture here at Colden Hills. Just keep it good-natured, yeah? Use your best judgment. Treat others the way you want to be treated. You’ve heard it all before, right?” she asks herself, then answers before anybody else can: “Right.”
The girls around Hannah roll their eyes and groan, while the boys farther afield begin to whisper excitedly, and no one anywhere makes any indication that they’ve taken Erin’s words to heart. But her job wasn’t to hammer anything in—more to stick it loosely to the wall with already-used Scotch tape and pray it doesn’t come loose later—so as far as she’s concerned, her work here is done. The counselors gather up their groups, gently rousing the youngest kids from the wreckage of their sugar crashes, and march everybody to their cabins for the night.
Because it’s past dark now, the counselors issue a buddy system, and because there’s fifteen in Dogwood and Hannah’s social-anxiety-induced language loss includes the words for “Hey, wanna—?” she ends up being the odd girl out.
No worries. Erin guardian-angels forward, blonde braids closer to clown-wig orange in the incandescent lights outside the mess hall. She links her arm up with Hannah’s and flashes a magnanimous smile. How pathetic, Hannah thinks, to be chosen by the one person who has no preference whatsoever.
They walk slowly, two by two, through the field toward the bend of the lake to Dogwood, every sprinkle Hannah ate whittling to a splinter in her gut. Somewhere around the flagpole, she disconnects from Erin, pretending she needs her arm—her right arm in particular—to . . . What? Push back the cuticles on her left hand? Adjust the strap of her (admittedly unnecessary) training bra? If Erin notices, or cares, she doesn’t show it.
Whatever, Hannah doesn’t need a buddy system. She’s been just fine all this time on her own.
MUSIC MONDAY
So that the camp’s founder doesn’t come back from whatever cruise-ship lounge he’s currently playing to rain his disappointment down upon the staff for completely losing the plot, every week at Colden Hills Music Camp starts with Music Monday.
There are, again, no instruments to speak of. Not a cheapo cigar-box guitar or elementary-school recorder in sight. Instead, Music Monday consists of what feels like fairly nondescript programming: a breakfast of rubbery eggs, followed by a somber flag-raising ceremony made more somber when one of the flag’s corners touches the ground and one kid on duty has to break the news to the other kid on duty that now they’re for sure both going to hell, followed by a generalized running-around in the vague pattern of a kickball game, followed by a lunch of rubbery meat. The thematic element comes in the afternoon, in the form of an all-camp bonfire meant to give campers an introduction to Colden Hills’ time-honored sing-alongs.
A big fire in broad daylight is a puzzling choice, especially brutal since the morning’s swim tests had to be postponed after the county issued an algal bloom warning for all lakes in the area. It’s eighty-five and climbing, but at least the smoke seems to be keeping the mosquitoes at bay. All day, Hannah has been minding her own business, pretending to be absorbed in the act of thumbing X’s over the red bites that keep popping up all over her calves and arms. The second an X fades, she uses her nail to dig a new one in its place, like she’s the groundskeeper of some disgusting, probably disease-ridden garden, and don’t even bother trying to get her attention—this is a full-time job.
The campers are halfway through their third cheerful rendition of “Herman the Worm,” a song about a worm who eats all the other worms in his family. Hannah’s mouthing the words—because we’re in puberty-voice-crack territory here and she’s not crazy—when she hears it.
A girl from her cabin, Sammy, she thinks, and a boy she recognizes from Maple, looks like a Dean—but then again, doesn’t every boy you’re sure won’t give you the time of day kind of look like a Dean? They’re in the row in front of her, leaning over a stack of Polaroids and snickering.
Hannah’s heart drops. She put herself to bed early last night, not because she was tired but because, with how narrow the mattresses are, how treacherously high the top bunks, that’s the one time a person can be seen alone around here and guaranteed no one’s going to feel sorry for them. When did she cross over from not at all sleepy to dead-to-the-whole-world asleep? She has a dim recollection of white flashes saturating the air like sheet lightning, wonders what photos she’s drooling in the background of, or worse—are her cabinmates this cruel?—maybe even the subject of. Bad enough that she’s a loner, worse that she’s the baby of the cabin.
She tries scooching her seat forward before remembering what they’re all sitting on are these colossal oak logs that aren’t going to budge a bit.
Not-Dean throws her a bone when he lifts one of the Polaroids, waving it in Sammy’s delicately freckled, neatly lip-glossed face.
It’s a candid, or pretending to be. In it, two girls are sitting cross-legged on the cabin floor, one painting the other’s nails a glittery aquamarine blue. Josie? Leia? Everyone’d ripped off their name tag as soon as they’d come in from the ice cream social, like it was the uncoolest of uncool accessories. Sammy’s in the corner of the shot, clearly having snuck in at the last moment, the only one acknowledging the camera is there. She’s standing behind the manicure recipient, holding two fingers behind the girl’s head in a “V” that makes Hannah think peace, maaan, or the shape of one of those old-school TV antennae.
Hannah scans the rest of the photo, breathes a sigh of relief when she’s a no-show after all. But then:
“You never hear of the bunny-ear kids?” Not-Dean’s voice is scolding, a little too sharp to be strictly flirtatious.
Sammy scrunches her nose, shakes her head no. Hannah feels herself getting pulled in. She wants so desperately to be part of their too-old-for-camp-songs club that verse seven or eight of “Herman the Worm,” in which Herman cannibalizes his grandpa, begins sinking into the murky background.
Not-Dean clears his throat, preparing to step into the role of veteran camper showing a newbie the ways of the world.
He asks, “Remember the camp map? Backwards question mark, all that?” Sammy nods. “Well, a question mark doesn’t just stand on its own. It has to come after something. So picture the sentence that came before it. Any sentence, but it’s gotta be a question.” More nodding—Sammy’s what Hannah’s school guidance counselor would call an active listener.
After a minute: “So? What’s your sentence?”
“My sentence?” Sammy looks surprised.
“Yeah. I told you to picture it. What’d you pick?”
She smirks, charmed by her instructor’s more interactive style of lecture. “Okay, my sentence is . . . ‘Does Ben really think I believe in ghost stories?’”
Ah, so it’s Ben then.
Not-Dean-but-Ben takes his turn in the back-and-forth smirk battle Sammy started. “Good. Now picture that whole sentence backwards, and picture where that last ‘s’ is, to the right of the question mark. At the top of that ‘s’ is the town cemetery—you might’ve passed it on your drive in. And at the very middle of that ‘s’ is where the bunny-ear kids live.”
“Cemetery, spooooky.” Sammy twirls her long, fine hair, which Hannah’s come to suspect is surrounded by some magical humidity-repelling force field. “So what’s the deal with the bunny-ear kids? Are they a competing camp or something? Do they actually have a working archery range or is it just as janky as ours?”
“Not exactly.” Either Ben’s eyes go fully dark, or he just tilts his head so from where Hannah’s sitting the campfire’s no longer reflected in them. Yeah, that’s the better, safer explanation. “Legend has it they’re kids who went to Colden Hills, just like us, a long, long time ago. Only, the unthinkable happened. Their parents never picked them up when camp was over, so they just had to . . . stick around.”
Sammy scoffs. “Like the counselors wouldn’t call home for them.”
“The counselors did call home, but no one picked up, or someone did pick up but still never showed. Anyway, eventually, the counselors leave too. They have whole lives outside of Colden Hills they gotta get back to.”
Hannah feels the skin on the back of her neck prickle, suddenly feels exactly zero of all the degrees Fahrenheit it is out here.
Sammy goes on, deliberately, “But whoever’s in charge wouldn’t just leave kids here. That’s, like, child abuse, isn’t it?”
Ben shrugs. “Counselors are only a year or two older than you and me, remember. Tommy just graduated. They got their last paychecks, and a promise from some distracted mom or deadbeat dad or Richie Rich type’s nanny that they were on their way. There was still plenty of food in the mess hall fridges. It wouldn’t all go bad for another week.”
In some far less important corner of Hannah’s universe, the rest of the campers have moved onto “Boom Chicka Boom.” They’re doing the janitor verse—I said a broom sweep-a broom, I said a broom sweep-a broom—and every emphasized word feels like heavy footfalls coming closer.
“Then what?” Sammy’s starting to look uncomfortable.
“Then . . . no one came. And the kids basically went feral. Or a nicer way to say it is, their families abandoned them, so they moved out to the middle of the ‘s’—remember your ‘s’?—and they made their own kind of family. And it would be nice like that, very after-school special, except for the way they got their name, the bunny-ear kids.”
“Which is?”
“Well, they needed a uniform. A way of saying they were all in this together, and they weren’t like anyone else. And also that, living out in the woods like they were, they were part kid but also part beast. At first they used stuff they found lying around, like a pair of branches or two big leaves. They’d put them in that ‘V’ shape and braid them into their hair, or weave them in with moss or whatever. But then they’d been out there so long, they wanted something more . . . permanent. Something that felt more like an extension of their bodies.”
“So?”
“So . . . Next came animals, little ones that weren’t too hard to catch. Lizard tails, squirrel tails were a big one. They’d never use actual rabbit ears. That’d be, like, sacrilege, the rabbit being their mascot and all. Only, since that stuff’s a lot heavier than branches, they had to find a different way to attach it. They started sewing it right onto their scalps.”
By now, Ben’s story has drawn a small crowd. He pauses and chews his lip all rehearsed, like, wait, there’s more, but I’m not sure my gentle audience can take it. When no one objects, he plunges on:
“Then, when that wasn’t enough, well. I told you the cemetery was nearby.”
Sammy’s got scared-horse eyes Hannah recognizes from Animal Planet and a look around her chin like she might throw up. “And?”
“And?” He waves the Polaroid again. “See for yourself. What makes better bunny ears than two human fingers? Not like the corpses were going to miss them. The kids must’ve figured so long as they put the dirt back where they found it, no one would be the wiser.”
“Why bunny ears?” It’s the girl sitting on the other side of Sammy now—called MJ, Hannah knows for sure, because she’s wearing a gold chain with a cursive “MJ” pendant, very considerate. MJ’s playing the skeptic, but the rest of the listeners, whose names aren’t so conveniently spelled out, look rapt. Hannah makes a silent vow that tomorrow she’ll try out the sunburnt lady’s mnemonic devices, try doing a better job being a member of society.
“A promise,” Ben says. “A threat, I guess you could call it. Because what do bunnies do best?”
“I don’t know,” Sammy barely breathes. MJ steps in: “They multiply.”
Ben nods, satisfied with his students’ progress. “They multiply. That, and what your counselor said yesterday is true. Colden Hills has a long, proud history of epic prank wars. And throwing up the bunny ears, though obviously mild compared to the stuff we do now, was kind of a big deal back then. The prank that started it all.”
“So what?” MJ’s visibly annoyed. “When we do it, we’re, what, summoning them? You said yourself they chose to leave camp. I know it’s a shithole”—she gestures broadly toward the lake they can’t swim in, the craft room without air-conditioning, the sheds full of rusting and hole-filled gear—“but at least there’s shelter. If they left then, why would they come back now?”
Here the Maple boy next to Ben, who’s been eavesdropping and can’t contain himself any longer—or else it’s his cue to join the act, be the grand finale—leans toward the girls with two fingers of his right hand in bunny-ears formation. Only he’s got them pressed together, curving them then extending them, and he’s making exaggerated alien suction noises with his mouth that make Hannah think of a rain boot being pulled out of deep mud.
“Perv!” Sammy gasps, pushing him away, and Hannah feels her face get red-hot, though she’s not one-hundred-percent sure why. At that very moment, the girl to Hannah’s left—definitely not Dogwood, Sycamore probably—elbows her and asks her if she’s got any gum, and Hannah has to say no, because her parents have yet to deposit money into her commissary bank, which means she’s stuck with whatever she gets in mess hall, no special treats like freezer pops or Big Red.
The Sycamore girl turns away, disinterested, and when Hannah rotates back to the conversation in front of her, it’s devolved into playful shoves and speculation about the end-of-week dance. Hannah drops her eyes, feeling all the way thirteen.
Midway through the counselor-led call-and-response of “The Green Grass Grew All Around,” she answers MJ’s question from earlier in her head. Why would the bunny-ear kids come back?
Because bunnies never stop multiplying.
And cemeteries only have so many bodies.
TRAILBLAZING TUESDAY
Over a breakfast of soggy waffle sticks and twelve carefully portioned-out grapes, Hannah learns that the bunny-ear kids aren’t the only thing you’ve got to worry about at Colden Hills. No, what you’ve got to live in absolute fear of, bite your nails to the quick about, sweat through your flimsy mattress each night over, is the very real possibility of getting your period underwear run up the flagpole.
One of the veteran Dogwood girls, Olivia, is regaling the table with stories of prank wars past. Olivia looks like she could be Miss New Jersey Teen USA, Baywatch-high terry-cloth shorts, some actual topography beneath her tank top. For a mnemonic device, Hannah pictures her doing a practiced pageant wave with a green olive stuck on each fingertip.
“Shaving cream s’mores is a classic,” the older girl says. “It’ll probably be one of the Maple guys, since if anyone’s shaving, it’s them. They’ll offer to make you a s’mores, super gentlemanlike, and when you’re not looking they’ll squirt Gillette between the graham cracker and chocolate where the marshmallow should go.”
The girls wrinkle their noses and laugh, but Hannah can tell every one of them’s thinking the same thing: that they’re in the clear, that they’d never let it happen to them.
“Hot sauce in your Kool-Aid, same idea,” Olivia goes on, “except anyone can do it. Maple likes to recruit the Oak boys to do their dirty work, but the really little kids are mostly spared. Leave them to their innocence and boondoggles, you know? Hm, what else . . .” She stirs a butter knife through her miniature tub of syrup. “Vaseline on the toilet seat, saran wrap over the toilet seat, mud in the toilet. Sensing a theme, huh? Those ones they mostly do to each other.”
A chorus of ew-yucks and no-ways chimes around the table. Hannah eyeballs her carton of chocolate milk like who even knows what’s in there anymore?
“If you see a bunch of ants on your bed, don’t freak out. They’re probably just chocolate sprinkles. Same goes with ants in your bed. That’ll be the old sand-in-sleeping-bag gag. Anyway, whatever it is, try to play it cool. Don’t give them the satisfaction. As soon as they see it bothers you, you’re an easy target.”
The underwear up the flagpole, though? Whole different animal. Unless you have your name embroidered on the front, that one’s not a personal attack. No one can really know they’re yours. Even the guys pulling the prank probably don’t have a clue. They wait to raid your cabin when no one’s home—assignments are posted on the mess-hall window, so it’s public knowledge who’s on wake-up call duty or trash duty any given day—then they rummage around from suitcase to suitcase, duffel bag to duffel bag, till they find a pair incriminating enough. Sometimes the underwear itself is mortifying: plain, loose, and grannyish. Or, on the other side of things, too sleazy: what you’d categorize as panties, whale tale and rhinestones, trying too hard.
More often than not, though, it’s the stain they’re on the lookout for. A fresh, red Rorschach, big enough to be noticed from thirty feet down.
It’s not a personal attack: It’s an attack on all girlkind. It’s the reason the Dogwood counselors started keeping a discreet stash of pads and tampons in the topmost compartment of the tackle box beside the cabin door, and the reason the Maple counselors started dropping the “boys will be boys” line into every conversation, so it’s nice and worn-in when they have to deploy it big-time. It’s the reason if a girl bleeds through her underwear, she’ll wear that same pair the rest of the week, like swallowing a key or sewing a secret love letter into your jacket’s lining. Because the boys can’t find it if it’s on her person.
For all forty-five minutes of morning free time that day, Hannah’s bent over her suitcase reevaluating every life choice she’s ever made that’s led her to her current selection.
It’s all shoved in the top mesh compartment, all the same: white cotton with scalloped edges, a dainty 3D rosebud at the hem. The kind somebody’s mom spots at the department store, thinks “How sweet,” and buys in packs of seven. One pair is lightly stained, yes—an old, persistent stain dozens of washes haven’t been able to get out—and Hannah flashes back to the excruciating conversation from around that time, about keeping a monthly calendar and being a young lady now. Another pair, though unmarked, has a clump of thread unraveling around the leg. She shoves both into the bottom of her pillowcase and exhales for the first time this century.
It’s a relief to disappear them like that, actually. Like all the girly things that Hannah’s not really about.
Her tomboyishness has always been a sore subject with her parents. They can’t go a week without making some comment about her short, usually unbrushed hair, her preference for baggy cargo pants from the boys’ section over tight, bedazzled skinny jeans. Her absolutely lethal allergy to the Frankensteined monstrosity that is skorts. You’d think they’d be used to it by year thirteen, or at least grateful she’s not stretching their already near-translucent budget with non-necessities like makeup and butterfly clips.
The trouble, though, is they wanted a girl. She knows that. Not just a girl but a real girl, a girl-girl, like Olivia or Sammy. Barbies, manicures, giggly sleepovers, the works. And having girlfriends was part of that, obviously. She’d already gotten the message, but then, a couple months ago, something her parents said made it painfully clear.
She was on an expedition to the bathroom, having bravely left her post at the family’s shared computer mid-game, when she passed her parents’ bedroom, the door cracked slightly open.
Yearbooks had been distributed at school that day. Hannah’s mom was sitting on the bed, Hannah’s copy open on her lap.
“Am I going crazy?” her mom was saying. “Look at this.” She jabbed her finger at one of the pages. “Really look. I thought when we first got her yearbook photos, sure, there was a resemblance. Obviously, they’re related. Were, whatever. But now, seeing her next to all these other kids—I don’t know. It’s like she’s his identical twin, a whole decade later.”
Hannah’s dad spoke slowly, like tiptoeing through the minefield this absolutely was. “You don’t think it’s just . . . the hair? The clothes? That, plus her being a late bloomer? It doesn’t help that she’s almost the same age as he was when, you know.” He paused, cleared his throat of anything coming up that he knew better than to say. Then, softly: “We’ve talked about this. She’s still her own person, Patricia.”
Hannah’s mom slumped her shoulders. “I don’t know, Dave. Is she? It’s getting worse the older she gets. And it’s not just the superficial stuff. It’s the way she . . . holds a fork? Have you noticed? With her whole fist? It’s like being with his ghost.”
There’s no shortage of anxieties for the seventh-grader willing to entertain them, and with all of them tugging constantly at her attention, either Hannah hasn’t thought much about that night since, or she’s relegated her thoughts about it to such a deep, subconscious crevice of her brain that her conscious self would need spelunking gear and a cave map to ever find them.
But something about the prospect of a week spent boarded up with fifteen strangers is reminding her how much of her time outside of Colden Hills she spends alone. Never mind that by now her cabinmates don’t seem like strangers to one another. Hannah’s seen friendship bracelets exchanged, and three of them even made matching tie-dyed shirts during crafts block.
Worse, Ben’s story about the bunny-ear kids is glomming onto that loneliness in the weirdest way. Yesterday, when he told it, Hannah figured those kids’ parents never picked them up because they were bad kids. Like, keying teachers’ cars, lawn-mowering over the neighbor’s foot, accidentally-on-purpose lighting the classroom gerbil on fire level bad. Spiteful and uncontrollable, so that their parents had no choice, after countless attempts to improve the situation, but to send the kids to Colden Hills and make it a lifelong sentence.
Bad kids don’t get to go home. That’s the only explanation.
Except now, Hannah’s wondering: How much would it really take for your parents to want to be rid of you?
Hannah’s an only child, yes, has accepted this as a main, load-bearing pillar of her identity. It’s the thing she’s been longer than she’s been almost anything else. But what if what she really is, to her parents anyway, is the kid sister who, with every passing year, reminds them more and more of their dead son?
Hannah can’t shake these thoughts, and Trailblazing Tuesday passes in a haze of water-balloon tag, sloppy joes, and doubt.
She’s still caught up in them when mail from home gets passed out in the mess hall after lunch, and of course she comes up zilch. “Of course” because it’s only Tuesday, duh, and for her to receive a letter today her parents would have had to send it the day they dropped her off. And it’s okay if they didn’t miss her that soon.
But will they miss her eventually? Will they miss her, like, ever?
She’s still lost in those thoughts when she gets lost, actually lost, during the day’s main event: a sunset hike around the still-potentially-contaminated lake. She gets separated from the group just as the sun sinks below the treeline, the sky around it a radioactive orange. She’s only lost for four or five minutes before Erin, with her rescue searchlight of bright blonde hair, appears in the small clearing. Not even long enough to qualify as “lost,” really—more like “briefly lagging behind.”
But it’s enough time to feel ashamed, because how does one even get lost on a trail around a lake? Just follow the sounds of the burping toads, the water. Hannah’s not the spoiled kind of only child, the kind swaddled from birth in parental attention, so she’s got to be the self-sufficient kind. The kind that’s straight-A’s at being alone.
And she is that—though maybe dock a few points off her final grade for failing this particular wilderness test.
Only, if she lets herself admit it, she’s always had this nagging feeling, ever since she was little. That, somehow, she wasn’t meant to be doing this whole thing solo.
She feels it again that night, by the lake. The presence of someone or something there with her. It scurries into the brush as Erin approaches, making too much contact with just about everything to be something as careful as a deer, as small as a possum or raccoon.
It’s only four or five minutes, but it’s enough time for Hannah to be outed too. Like if an apex predator is out casing the joint and homes in on one undersized gazelle that’s separated from the rest of the herd—and not just separated, but pitiful, crying like a little baby about it?
The predator’s going to remember that, right?
Going to mentally tag, for the real hunt, this sniveling, susceptible animal.
WET & WILD WEDNESDAY
Halfway through the week, because there is some justice in this world after all, the county health officials clear Colden Lake for recreational activities.
And because, scratch that, on second thought, there’s absolutely no justice in this world whatsoever, Hannah gets her period.
It’s days early according to the little calendar she half keeps track of in the back of one of her spiral notebooks. Probably summoned it with the underwear-under-the-pillow thing. She remembers the spells the kids at school cast to make snow days happen: wearing their pajamas inside-out, flushing ice cubes down the toilet, sticking white crayons in the freezer overnight. More often than not, one of these works, the odds in eastern Pennsylvania being pretty good to begin with. The other popular one is sleeping with a spoon under your pillow, which suggests to Hannah that this spot is home to, like, some tear in the fabric of the universe through which magic, the good and bad kind, can pass through. She should’ve known better than to tamper with it.
She finds reinforcements in her bag, thank God. Turns out her mom did remember to pack those. Spared a very public trip to the cabin tackle box, Hannah feels an overwhelming swell of appreciation for her parents, like how could she ever have questioned their love for her?
She readies herself in a bathroom stall, gets dressed there too, while the rest of the girls are stripping down, helping each other with straps and tags back at the cabin. In her one-piece swimsuit off the sales rack, Hannah’s the most flat-chested she’s ever been. The vertical stripes pull her proportions in all the wrong directions, so she comes out looking more surfboard than teenage girl.
She wraps her towel around her chest protectively and, in the solitude of the girls’ lav, takes a series of deep, measured breaths. It’s all wet rust and mildewed shower curtains, but for this moment, it’s her turf and hers alone. She thinks, okay, brain, time out, huddle up, and kicks off a pep talk about how it’s already Wednesday and so the game plan is this: Get through swim tests, get through field day, get through whatever else Colden Hills throws at her, then go home and never see or talk to or even think about any of these people ever again. Hands in, go team. She’s reminding her brain that one week can’t last forever—unless you’re the bunny-ear kids, of course—when the lavatory door swings open and the Dogwood girls flood in.
“Did you bring one?” one of them asks, giddy. “It’s okay if you didn’t. You can borrow mine. My sister does it all the time.”
It’s Sammy, MJ, Yume, and Jeanette—Hannah rattles through her mnemonics for each—in a swirl of colorful tankinis and cacophonous flip-flops. They’re walking like on some top-secret mission, and through the gap in the stall door, Hannah soon sees why. A bright pink razor blossoms from each girl’s palm, and MJ, bringing up the rear, produces a can of vanilla-scented Skintimate. Hannah recognizes the swooshy banner and yellow-to-orange gradient from the pharmacy aisle, though her mom would never buy it, insists her dad’s shaving cream is cheaper and does the job fine.
One by one, like dancers in a cancan line, the girls throw a leg up on the rim of a sink and begin to shave.
There’s no mirror in Hannah’s stall but she’s the exact color of canned beets and she knows it. She’s acutely aware of her legs now, virgin ground untouched by any blade, and especially the part below the knee, which, because the fates are cruel like that, happens to be both the hairiest part and the only part visible beneath the bottom edge of the bathroom stall. She tries to console herself: From this angle, if she squints, it looks more like dried mud, like she slid during a rainy game of kickball and it smudged and hardened. But then she reaches down and, yep, that’s hair all right.
She swears she can feel a burning pressure inside her follicles, like the hair is growing faster than her body can handle. Like animal fur, the thought occurs to her. Or another tick on her parents’ looks-just-like-her-brother checklist.
Even if her legs didn’t suddenly feel like they were on fire, Hannah wouldn’t be able to stay there for long. Bathroom math is a delicate thing: If you’re in and out too quick, gross, guess you didn’t wash your hands; if you take too much time, gross for different reasons. She might not be the type people naturally pay attention to, but the girls are bound to notice her eventually.
Hannah briefly considers evaporating her corporeal form through the rafters and letting the clouds over Colden Hills absorb her, like in the precipitation cycle she learned about in science class last year. In the end, though, she settles for dropping the towel to her waist, twisting the lock, making a big show of using the soap dispenser, and walking briskly out the door.
The morning’s swim test is uneventful on the one hand, excruciating on the other. Uneventful because she’s a competent enough swimmer that breaststroking to the buoys and back is the most hilarious joke. Excruciating because, after that, she’s got to sit on the shore with the other kids, air-drying like so much forgotten laundry and waiting, and this is when all her usual symptoms come out in full force.
The thing about her current circumstances, though, is it’s impossible to know whether her pounding headache and bone-deep exhaustion really are Aunt Flo rudely knocking, or dehydration setting in after all the sun she’s gotten, or night after night of the restless sleep of bunk beds, or severe computer withdrawal, or whatever disease she’s probably contracted from the algae bloom or mosquitoes by now. Or just, you know, the consequences of racking her brain so hard about why she still hasn’t gotten a letter, still hasn’t had money deposited in her commissary account, and how her parents’ hushed conversation months ago might factor into all that.
If she’d gotten to be part of that conversation, she might’ve said: How can they think they’re the only ones who miss him, the only ones who’ve been deprived? At least they got to know him—for thirteen whole years, too. How dare they keep depriving her of him now? She must’ve been a toddler when he died, doesn’t remember. How different would their relationship be if they let her in?
How different would her life have been if she’d had that kind of companion?
She feels that tug again, like someone’s waiting in the bushes. Watching her or watching over her, she can’t be sure.
Anyway, your brain’s like any other part of your body: you work it too hard, it’s going to get tired. That explains the cottonheadedness Hannah feels when Erin calls for cabin check-in, and the spots that swarm her vision when she stands up too fast to go.
It’s obvious enough that Erin gives Hannah a pass to skip the rest of the “wet and wild” portion of the day—there are canoes being hauled down from the storage sheds, pool noodles that look like a Rottweiler got to them—with orders to head straight to the infirmary. There’s only one lifeguard on duty, Counselor Tommy, to ninety-something kids: a ratio that doesn’t exactly support knowingly letting a sick one go off into the water, wobbly and weak.
The infirmary is just across from the mess hall and indistinguishable from the other cabins, except for the relative lack of windows and the white banner with a red cross nailed to the front door. Inside is the woman from the welcome desk, her bare shoulders more healthy-human-skin-colored now, less surface of Mars. She greets Hannah with an enthusiastic:
“Gessen!”
It makes Hannah feel nice and liquid, grateful to be remembered.
The woman’s wearing a name tag now. HELLO MY NAME IS: Tess.
Tess has Hannah lie down on a cot and thrusts an extra-large water bottle at her, saying by the time Hannah walks out of here, this had gosh darn better be empty. She sticks a thermometer under Hannah’s tongue, a stethoscope on her back above where her swimsuit scoops. She brings out one of those blood-pressure cuffs that feel like an anaconda hug and lets Hannah choose which arm. There’s only one other kid in the infirmary, and he’s at the end of the row of cots, facing the wall, so for the first time in a long time Hannah feels like she can relax. Tess gives her a couple of Tylenol and soon everything starts to lag, until finally, mercifully, Hannah powers down.
When she wakes, the other kid is gone.
“Seems like you were in sore need of a nap, kiddo,” Tess says. “Clean bill of health, though. Except all those bites. They’re really going after you, huh? Even with bug spray?”
Hannah scratches her arm absently and nods. Leaves out the bit about not being able to buy spray, due to her parents having completely forgotten about her, wanting her to be dead to them to match her actually dead brother.
Tess frowns sympathetically. “I’ll give you some calamine lotion. Unlucky about these ones”—she taps two fingers against the center top of her forehead—“but apply this a couple times a day and I bet they’ll be gone in time for Friday’s dance.”
Hannah reaches for her own forehead and, true enough, finds two enormous welts forming there, about an inch and a half apart, almost but not quite hidden by the first baby wisps of her hairline.
Where a smarter girl would’ve grown bangs to conceal exactly this kind of problem.
And where—Hannah feels a bolt of lightning course through her—bunny ears would sprout from.
THRILLING THURSDAY
The plan was zip-lining and ropes-coursing, trust falls off wooden platforms built around the trunks of trees, but the sky cracked open in the early morning and after that the rain wouldn’t let up.
Hannah has a hard time imagining that a ropes course built by the Colden Hills people could be any definition of safe, but Counselor Tommy insists their setup—located past the cabins, all the way at the tippy-top of the question mark—is totally legit. Not that she’ll find out now. While the field takes on the consistency of a chocolate milkshake, everyone’s relegated to the mess hall, where the counselors announce the backup plan: campers in two groups, one in charge of making decorations for tomorrow’s dance, the other putting together an impromptu talent show.
Hannah feels a knife twist in her gut at the mention of “talent show,” decides to blame it on a particularly nasty cramp. She practically teleports to the side of the room designated for Team Decorators, passing kids murmur-bragging about their knack for celebrity impressions, or how fast they can do the clapping cup game. The only semi-talent Hannah can think of is her knowledge of all the cheat codes in The Sims, and rattling those off hardly counts as entertainment. No way she’s going to get up and perform in front of everybody on a good day—and that’s when she doesn’t have a pair of Mount Vesuviuses protruding from her forehead.
The bites got worse overnight, even with Hannah smothering the calamine on twice as often as prescribed, in addition to her usual ritual of thumbnail X’s. From afar, they could be mistaken for your run-of-the-mill period zits. She can’t decide if that’s better or worse than the other versions of the truth: that mosquitoes really are obsessed with her, or that—she thinks this part more quietly—the bunny-ear kids are.
Either way, she’s not looking forward to the fresh swarm of bloodsuckers bound to be drawn out by the rain. Everyone else is talking about how they’re just so glad the heat broke, and puddle jumping’s for babies but all right sometimes, and maybe there’ll be a nice rainbow when the clouds clear.
“Double rainbow!” Ben’s friend, the one Sammy accused of being a pervert, is shouting from the other side of the room. Hannah recognizes the video he’s quoting—it’s been making the rounds since the beginning of the year. “Double rainbow! Whoa-ho-ho! All the way across the sky!” He’s made for the talent-show group, all bugged-out eyes and hands sweeping in exaggerated arcs so the kids nearest him have to duck to avoid getting whacked in the face. The real surprise is Ben’s not with him, is instead leaning over a rectangular table near Hannah, casually flipping through the construction paper the counselors laid out.
Hannah doesn’t give herself time to think. Just fluffs her hair over the bumps best she can, picks up a bottle of puffy paint (because you don’t show up at someone else’s house empty-handed), and marches over.
“Hey.” So far, so good. Then, so she doesn’t have to hear him admit he has no earthly idea who she is: “I’m Hannah. Dogwood.”
Ben looks up, brows raised. “Hey, Hannah. I’m Ben. Maple.” He takes the puffy paint she’s holding out to him for some reason. “You decorating too?”
“Yeah,” she says. “I don’t really have a talent.”
He laughs. “Me neither. Unless we can hold a food-eating contest. My mom’s always complaining about how much me and my brothers eat. Except judging by what I’ve seen here”—he tips his chin toward the kitchen—“Colden Hills is clearly under some tight rations.”
Hannah perks up. “You have brothers?”
“Two. Older. One’s in his second year at Penn. You?”
Hannah’s pause is too long for so straightforward a question. “No,” she says finally. “Nope. Only child.”
“Lucky.” Ben grins. “When you’ve got brothers, and you can’t be the biggest or oldest, you gotta be the quickest. That’s why I can eat so fast. Fifteen years of training. If you don’t get to the food first and get your fill, they’ll finish it off before you can take a bite.”
He sits down and starts cutting the construction paper into many-colored strips. At a neighboring table, kids are making construction-paper stars and hand turkeys, while counselors blow up balloons and try to fashion them into the beginnings of an arch. Every so often, one breathes deep into a balloon and emerges with a squeaky Alvin and the Chipmunks voice, sending the other counselors into a giggling fit. At one point, there’s a muffled shriek, followed by high-fives and laughter—Hannah assumes someone’s hot-sauce-in-the-Kool-Aid trick went off without a hitch.
When Ben has accumulated a pile of strips, he slides them across to Hannah, along with a half-used glue stick, the kind that goes on purple but dries clear. “Well, fellow child laborer? These decorations aren’t going to make themselves.”
Hannah feels the morning’s tater tots churning inside her, but forces a smile, starts on her part of the paper-chain factory line. Five loops in, she says, “You’re good at scary stories too.”
“Hm?” Ben’s back on strip-cutting duty.
“Oh, I just mean—” she stumbles. “For the talent show. If you did want to do something. Storytelling’s a good talent.” When the crease in his forehead doesn’t smooth out, she explains, “I heard you, Monday. At the bonfire?”
“Oh-h-h. Right. The bunny-ear kids.” Hannah’s taken aback by the mocking note in his voice, his sideways smirk, so different from the solemn posture he maintained in front of Sammy, MJ, and the others.
“You don’t believe it? That they haunt Colden Hills?” She works to keep her tone neutral. What made perfect sense in the confines of her head feels ridiculous flapping out there in the open air between them.
“Believe it?” Ben pushes another two or three dozen strips toward her side of the table, then puts his scissors down and sighs. “Listen, don’t tell your friends this. I know rainy days are pretty much tailor-made for ghost stories, but I’m not really in the mood. I’ve been waiting for the ropes course all week.”
Hannah’s brain catches on the word “friends”—Ben files her and the other Dogwood girls into the same category? Boys really are stupid. She misses something about Ben’s family being very into American Ninja Warrior, then unsticks herself in time to hear:
“The bunny-ear kids aren’t even special to Colden Hills. My brother told me about them, and he never went here. He heard the story during initiation week at his fraternity. And then my other brother said he’d already heard it too, a long time ago. At soccer camp. Youth soccer camp.”
“It’s been around that long?”
He nods. “All around. A true urban legend.”
Just then, three Maple boys swoop down on their table and, without acknowledging Hannah at all, drag Ben to the corner of the mess hall, where a group of them are drawing crime-scene chalk outlines of their bodies on butcher paper, over-the-top blood splatter and everything. Hannah finishes the paper chains in silence, mulling over what Ben said.
So the bunny-ear kids are just another Colden Hills prank, a rinse-and-repeat from the same book of pranks and tall tales used by all guys everywhere? Another thing for the Maple boys to laugh about while tallying hits in their cabin at the end of the night? Talking about “You should’ve seen her face, man” while Counselor Tommy listens in, pretending to be reproachful but actually totally proud?
But also: Ben said the story went beyond Colden Hills. That didn’t mean it didn’t start here. People take stories and retell them all the time, right? Could be something horrible happened at Penn, and at that youth soccer camp, and people just pinned it on the bunny-ear kids because it feels good to give the villain a name, feels even better to give it a face you recognize. It’s not the bunny-ear kids’ fault, really, but once those people decided their evil thing looked like the bunny-ear kids, it couldn’t look like anything else ever again.
Just like her parents’ idea that Hannah is identical to her long-gone brother, more and more so every day. How’s she supposed to undo that? What good would all the frilly dresses and acrylic nails in the world be, when they’ve already made their minds up about her? Worse, when it’s two against one?
If they don’t pick her up Saturday, it won’t even be the first time. And she was wearing a frilly dress, and nail polish, at least one of the times they forgot. A piano recital, at the upscale performing arts center downtown that’s approximately ninety-percent mahogany. She was nine. It was her first and only recital before her mom broke the news that, sorry, Han, it’s not good for the headaches, and we’re never going to be able to afford a piano, so how would you practice anyway? Hannah would’ve come to the same conclusion soon enough. Her unsteady “Twinkle Twinkle” was pathetic compared to the Bachs and Beethovens of the other students her age. She figured her fingers were just made for a different set of keys.
Similar memories slideshow through her mind, unwelcome. Hannah waiting in the school parking lot on a day she had to stay late for a makeup history test, the janitors already gone, the sun low and lazy. Hannah waiting outside the Barnes & Noble five hours after her mom had dropped her off, two hours after their agreed-upon meeting time. At one point, a young employee of the Starbucks inside peeked his head out, asked if there was someone he could call. When Hannah shook her head no thanks, he brought her out a pity Frappuccino.
How long have her parents been trying to get rid of her? How has she been so blind to it?
Their town’s too small for them to just desert a kid in public, firehouse style. But sleepaway camp in a different state, paid for with years of holiday checks from a super rich, super religious great-aunt both her parents tacitly hate—basically blood money? They must’ve really wanted this if they were willing to endure the smug look Aunt Lucy’ll be wearing the next time she visits, having reviewed her bank statements, knowing they finally cashed in.
Even yesterday, Hannah was so sick. Surely Tess or Erin or someone called her parents, gave them the full rundown of her symptoms, and still they didn’t come get her? Didn’t even ring up the camp landline, apparently, to check how she was feeling today.
How sick, how hurt, how scared would she have to be? Or are humans one of those species that are more likely to abandon their young the weaker they get?
“Ow!” The pain starts at her fingertips and seismic-waves up the length of her arm, ricocheting like it wants to be sure to hit every single nerve ending on the way. Jeanette, of the silky-smooth Skintimate brigade, is standing next to Hannah, a hammer in one hand, the other hand clasped over her mouth.
“Shit,” Jeanette whispers. “I’m sorry. I’m supposed to wear glasses, but, you know…” She waves a hand over her face in a gesture that says: but the moneymaker, you understand.
Hannah doubles over, clutching the pointer and middle fingers of her right hand like the more layers of defense she can put up between them and Bone Crusher Jeanette, the better. They pulse violently against her left palm, blood protesting.
Hannah and a few others were hanging paper chains along the back wall. It was a simple tape job most of the way, but then there was this weird squishy felt section, like the surface of a pool table, that Hannah assumed was for acoustics. Dampening the chatter of all those kids so, what, the local squirrel population doesn’t call in a noise complaint? Between that and the almost-windowless infirmary and the sloped cabin floors campers joke you can practically ski down, it’s clear whoever architected this place was a madman. Anyway, Jeanette got the okay from one of the counselors to put nails into the felt wall, so long as she tried to find the holes already there from past years, and Hannah was holding the loop of the paper chain real straight when—
Erin jogs over with a first-aid kit and a bag of frozen stir-fry. Jeanette shrinks into the background to, Hannah can only assume, locate her next victim. Ben sits up from where he was lying on the butcher paper, getting the dead-body treatment, but most of the other kids barely glance in her direction before going back to their alternative rainy-day fun.
Hannah musters up the strength to look at her fingernails, which are purpling already.
FIELD GAME FRIDAY
By seven the next morning, they’ve fallen off. The skin underneath is so deeply bruised it looks like Hannah tried to draw on a pair of replacement nails in black Sharpie, and in some places it’s peeling, as if air, to it, is some corrosive substance. Hannah stays in bed as long as she can, listening to Dogwood wake up around her, the girls babbling about lemon-juice highlights and the unlucky puke green of their pinnies and what they’re wearing to tonight’s dance. Yume’s snapping pictures with her Polaroid, trying to use up her film before the week’s end, and Olivia’s speculating that the Maple boys have been sneaking into the office and stealing her mail, again, just like last year, which is especially annoying because she’s expecting a letter from her real-life boyfriend, and not just any letter, but the R-rated kind.
Hannah feels safe and out of sight in her top bunk, the same way a cow stuck in a tree is safe from rescue because people, sane people, don’t think to look up there. Then Jeanette, AKA Thor, God of Thunder, peers over the edge of the mattress, hands up to show that Hannah can rest easy: She’s not wielding her mighty hammer this time.
“Morning,” Jeanette says tentatively. “How are you feeling?”
Hannah can tell Erin put her up to this. She does a quick scan of the cabin and, yep, there’s their counselor, one eye on the day bag she’s packing and the other on this lousy reconciliation-in-progress.
“I’m okay,” Hannah lies, tucking her arm under the covers because she doesn’t feel like trying to explain why the nails fell off so quickly, or why the bruising has started to wrap around the tops and backs of the fingers, and on the pointer finger is spreading down toward the second knuckle. “Just tired, is all. Didn’t get much sleep.”
That part isn’t a lie. Last night was worse than the others, and the others weren’t anything to write home about—not that writing home is an option. Hannah can’t be sure if she slept at all, if the shapes she saw in the night were dreams or waking thoughts run rampant or hallucinations or real, flesh-and-blood things.
There was a menagerie of beasts: hawks, elephants, jackals, goats, bear cubs, and, yes, rabbits too. Only when the cameraman in her mind panned out, she saw they were harmless: mere shadow puppets pinned to a wall. Another zoom out brought the sick realization that it wasn’t one hand making each animal, like she expected, but many. Because each hand was missing between one and three fingers, all of them had to work together, combining what they had left to make sure the shadow animal got all its parts.
Branches, two by two, had floated up to her, clumps of hair, skin, and viscera dangling from the ends. Some invisible drummer flicked them against her arms and legs, up and down and up and down like her body was a xylophone, like she was nothing but some children’s plaything.
When she woke, or didn’t wake but continued being awake, now with other awake people around her for perspective, she found the scratches on her forearms, as if all night she’d been running through an endless forest, whipped by every tree limb from here to Vermont.
Hannah always prided herself on being a sound sleeper, despite her parents’ monologues about all the screen time being bad for her REM. She was sure a certain time of night was none of her business.
Turns out she was right.
“I’m okay,” she says again to Jeanette, who looks plenty convinced already—she did what she came here to do, no need to put a debate team together about it.
“Good,” the other girl says, patting the sheet over Hannah’s hand with a little too much enthusiasm. Hannah winces. “Get ready then, huh? We’re leaving for field day any second.”
• • • •
Hannah’s forced to play red rover and partner relay, but Erin lets her sit out for the more rough-and-tumble games. While the other campers do crack the whip, throwing their bodies back and forth till they send the kid at the end of the line flying, Hannah sits under a tree and, with her good hand, picks at the dark hairs sticking out from the bottom of her pants leg. The bites on her forehead throb urgently. They rise half an inch off her face now, and are hot to the touch, and in the rhythm of their throbbing she hears an order.
Once everyone is good and warmed up, the counselors set out orange cones and sun-faded bean bags for the field-day special: capture the flag.
It’s what the athletic kids have been waiting for, because they get to show off—sprint into enemy territory, outrun any defenders, and return to their side a hero. It’s what the peaceful kids, the dreamers, have been waiting for too, because all they have to do is get tagged into another team’s jail and they get to sit in the soft, wet grass watching the passing clouds morph into jellyfish and profiles of famous figures till a teammate rudely appears to liberate them.
And it’s what Hannah’s been waiting for, because in four-way capture the flag there’s so much commotion that it’s easy enough for one measly thirteen-year-old to slip away unnoticed.
Especially because Erin’s in charge of the Dogwood girls. And is Hannah that, strictly speaking, anymore? Was she ever? A girl?
She runs the length of the straight part of the question mark, then partway around the backwards curve until she arrives at Dogwood. She never was much of a runner outside of Colden Hills, was always out of breath by the third lap of the fitness test’s timed mile. But something’s come over her now, some raw animal instinct. Wildebeest run a marathon every day—isn’t that what her science teacher said during their unit on Serengeti ecosystems? They don’t get tired, and even if they do, they don’t stop running. Because? Better tired than dead.
Besides, being a crummy runner, that’s in her other life. Everybody knows camp’s something else: a second chance, a place to try to answer all of your first life’s what if’s.
Without its campers, Dogwood is a sight. Gone are the girls’ overlapping voices, the warring aromas of mineral sunscreen and coconut-scented tanning oil, the flashes of Yume’s camera, bright enough to blind—and without them, Hannah can finally focus. She feels her senses sharpen. Her ears prick at the rustle of a leaf against wood clear across the cabin, the almost imperceptible plucking of a spider in her web. Hannah’s nose twitches when the breeze comes through the open windows, carrying the expected medley: air freshener, the rotten-egg smell she’s learned is caused by a not-necessarily-dangerous amount of sulfur in the water, petrichor from yesterday’s rain. And something else. Something . . . living. Warm and sour; salt, onions, and copper. It reminds her of the time they went to Newport for her mom’s birthday and Hannah got stuck in the tiny hotel elevator for forty minutes, with six other people, and her parents weren’t two of them—they had gone down to continental breakfast while she was still asleep. She never could forget the suffocating stench of those bodies, twice her height, pressing in on her, and the way her parents looked sitting at the table together after, splitting a cherry Danish. Like a complete thought on their own.
Like they were better off without her. Wouldn’t have noticed if she’d stayed in that elevator the rest of her life.
These are the nuances, of course, the scents she can pick up if she concentrates her new powers hard enough. The dominant smell in the room is that of sirloin steak left to spoil in the sun. She glances down at her pointer and middle fingers, black past the first and largest knuckle, and inflamed, like something inside is hot, too hot, and trying desperately to shrug the skin off.
With her left hand, Hannah flips the metal clasp on the tackle box, accordions out the compartments, and reaches past the complete Carefree and Always product lines to what she came here for: the needle-nose pliers, the spool of fishing line. She looks around for a ziplock and, coming up short, thinks to grab the old pair of period underwear she thrust into her pillowcase earlier in the week. No need to be picky: She just needs something to wrap them in when she’s done, so they don’t get lost before she has time to reattach them. And the underwear’s already ruined—what’s a little more gore? This way they’ll be perfect when the Maple boys find them, a shoo-in to get pulled up the flagpole for the final prank before everyone goes home. Yeah, once she’s through with them, no other bloody underwear’ll stand a chance. She’ll save every Dogwood girl the humiliation. So who’s the hero now?
Hannah won’t be there to see it, but that’s okay: it was never for her. She understands that now. There are places where she doesn’t belong.
And places where she does. Ben said it himself: after their parents abandoned them, the bunny-ear kids made their own kind of family. The thing about the old gag is this: you can’t give yourself bunny ears in a photo—you need someone beside you. It’s a given. You need a friend. It takes at least two.
She’ll bring them this sacrifice as a talisman of her devotion, proof she’s willing to destroy a part of herself to become something new. But she can’t do it all alone. Because of the placement on her head, and the fact that she’ll be missing two pretty crucial fingers, she’ll need their help to sew them on. Her first pair of bunny ears. Well, her first real, official pair, not counting the bites. Which were just the kids’ way of tapping her, she’s guessing, selecting her for their team.
Again Hannah, supposed only child, feels that profound ache at her side, like there’s meant to be more there—something or someone—that all her life has been absent.
What will she make of what she’s got left?
When she leaves Dogwood, she’s not so much running as hopping, tracing the curve of the backwards question mark till she finds the clearing where she got not-lost on Trailblazing Tuesday—where she first felt their nervous eyes upon her. If she’s visualizing Ben’s map correctly, it’s the closest she’s come to the home of the bunny-ear kids, and the closest to Colden Hills they’re willing to meet her. If there wasn’t a state park in the way, she’d be able to see straight through to the town cemetery, where, legend has it, they like to go foraging.
This near the lake, the top layers of ground are still dense, squelching mud. Hannah scoops up a handful and rubs it on her face, her arms, her stained ringer tee, and her still-tender mosquito bites are instantly soothed by the cool paste. Good, she thinks, smothering the mud all over her flat chest, all through her short hair, up and down her prickly legs. Good. The more she looks like them, like the brown rabbits she’s seen bounding across the field, the less she’ll look like a thirteen-year-old boy. One boy in particular, permanently thirteen.
Once she’s caked in the stuff, she unspools the fishing line and wraps it around her two dead-black fingers—once, twice, three times—and pulls. Better for everyone this way. Her parents won’t have to deal with the constant reminder of the son they once had, taking up space in their house, eating their frozen pancakes. They can move on. And she can move on too: spare herself the wicked wait as each camper, one by one, lugs their duffel to the car, waving behind them, then ahead, at the driver’s-side door already opening, at the somebody stepping out, arms outstretched to greet them, welcome them home. She’ll have a new home now. All the brothers she’s ever wanted.
Important to get a clean, straight line, so they sit on top of her head just right. Once the fishing line breaks through the skin, she’ll use the pliers to crack the bone, and when it’s time to position them, she’ll bend the tip of one of the fingers forward, like what happens with bunnies’ ears sometimes: one all cutesy-flopsy, the other on high alert.
And while everyone else is dancing tonight, in the mess hall she helped decorate in her previous life, she’ll have her own dance. One of those Southern-style debutante balls she learned about in social studies. Except not because she’s a young lady now. No, a proper coming out.
She pulls and pulls, and there’s a brilliant supernova pain, like a million camera flashes going off inside her bloodstream, when the plastic finally cuts through. Through the static that starts at the brink of her sight and pinwheels inward, she sees them. They’re here. They’ve kept their promise. They’ve come to pick her up.
At first, it’s just the one boy. He has a mop of wavy dark hair, a style that was en route to Mullet Town but took an unfortunate detour along the way. His bunny ears are the leg of a red fox, the broken wing of a songbird Hannah can’t identify. He’s smiling with every one of his rotten teeth. He’s holding, for some reason, a fork, with his whole fist—and as he approaches, Hannah understands. The fishing line isn’t going to be enough. He’s going to help her pry them off.
Like big brothers do for little sisters.
He uses his thumbs to bend the fork’s tines so they’re far enough apart, and it looks so easy, like either he’s wild-animal strong or the metal’s especially cheap and pliable, something straight out of Colden Hills’ mess hall, bought in bulk. Taking Hannah’s hand in his own, he positions the fork so the tines are on either side of the exposed bone. He leans forward until his forehead is touching her forehead. They inhale together, exhale together. She can detect the meat on his breath.
Then he tightens his grip on the fork’s handle, and he twists.
The crack is too quiet for the volume of the pain. In Hannah’s brain, acres of great oaks are simultaneously falling, an immense glacier is calving in two. Outside of it, though, it sounds more like a twig snapping—and there’s her first bunny ear glistening, like a fat worm, in her new brother’s palm.
The crack is quiet, but the kids have good ears, the best around, and it draws them out from where they’ve been hiding in the thick undergrowth. They appear, hesitantly: boys and girls her age, and younger, and older, infinitely older, with bunny ears made of stacked mushroom caps, pine cones, banana slugs, deer antlers, beaver tails, skunk tails, fisher-cat tails, whole snakes with tent stakes driven through to keep them a straight line.
The crack is quiet, but the scream is not. Hannah registers it as coming from the far side of the lake: a barn owl or a bobcat or even a mountain lion, maybe, if New Jersey’s got those. She isn’t sure. Wasn’t really paying attention during the first night’s nature safety video, and now everything’s getting hazy, like she’s looking at the world through the frosted glass at the dentist’s office, and her head’s light, and her throat’s gone raw.
There’s a commotion in the trees on the camp side of the clearing, and suddenly Olivia and Yume burst through. Yume’s swatting at invisible bugs and Olivia’s pulling burs from her terry-cloth shorts. Erin must’ve sent them when she realized Hannah was missing, the pair of them because the buddy system is pretty much a Colden Hills code. When they look up and see the crowd, the blood, the strange boy threading a large, curved needle, Yume makes a sound like she’s choking on commissary pudding and sprints back from where she came.
Only Olivia stays. Because she’s a veteran; she’s been around. She’s weathered every prank this camp has spit at her over the years, and nothing surprises her anymore. She’s hardened and, stupidly, she’s unafraid.
She whistles low, almost impressed. “Elaborate. Did Oak put you guys up to this?”
Hannah’s new brother turns to inspect the intruder and Hannah does the same, so their eyes move as one over Olivia’s ballerina-long limbs, her neatly lacquered fingernails. Then he turns back to Hannah and nods once. Hannah nods back, understanding.
She reaches Olivia in a single bound, pliers and fishing line poised. Bounds so fast that the other girl’s half-amused smile doesn’t have time to work itself into a yelp.
Some of the kids wear clothing so tattered it’s impossible to recognize it as clothing—as opposed to long strips of bark, as opposed to flayed skin—much less distinguish its era. Most wear nothing. They hold each other tight at the elbows, refusing to stray or separate. Some are missing fingers and even whole hands. When Hannah begins to forage Olivia for parts, the bunny-ear kids help, pushing their shrieking prey into the dirt.
In the grateful, kaleidoscopic stupor that overcomes Hannah at the end, she thinks: God, how beautiful.
They’re distinct from one another, each their own person, yet part of the same imperishable herd. Made whole despite what they’re missing.
Beautiful, and whole, yes.
And multiplying.
